The group commander didn’t touch the paper. He merely looked at it. He said pleasantly: ‘Yes?’
‘It’s my resignation,’ the division commander said.
‘You think it’s over, then?’
‘What?’ the division commander said. ‘Oh. The war. No, it’s not over. They’ll have something I can do as a civilian. I was even a fair veterinary in the old days, Farrier, too. Or maybe I could even run a production line (that’s what they call it, isn’t it?) in a munitions plant.’
‘And then?’ the group commander said.
The division commander looked at him, though only for a second. ‘Oh. When it is over, you mean. I’m leaving France then. Maybe to the south Pacific. An island.…’
‘Like Gauguin,’ the group commander said gently.
‘Who?’
‘Another man who one day discovered that he had had enough of France too and went to the south Pacific and became a painter.’
‘This is another place,’ the division commander said immediately. ‘There wont be enough people on this one to need their houses painted.’
The group commander reached his hand and took up the folded paper and turned and, the paper still folded, held the corner of it to the candle-flame until it took fire and then burst blazing, the group commander holding it for a second longer before he dropped it hissing into the chamberpot beside the bed and in the same motion slid himself down the pillows until he was reclining again, already drawing the covers up. ‘Chaulnesmont,’ he said. ‘At three tomorrow—— Bah, it’s already tomorrow.’ And then the division commander was aware of it too: the alteration, day, the invincible oblivious tomorrow which follows always, undeviable by man and to man immune; no longer ago than yesterday saw him and his fury, the first tomorrow will have forgotten both. It was even a second or so before he realised that the group commander was still talking to him: ‘—if the world thinks it wishes to stop fighting for twenty-five or thirty years, let it. But not this way. Not like a group of peasants in a half-mown field suddenly shouldering their scythes and lunch-pails and walking off. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’
‘Because there are rules,’ the division commander said harshly. ‘Our rules. We shall enforce them, or we shall die—the captains and the colonels—no matter what the cost——’
‘It wasn’t we who invented war,’ the group commander said. ‘It was war which created us. From the loins of man’s furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.’
‘But not me,’ the division commander said.
‘You,’ the group commander said. ‘We can permit even our own rank and file to let us down on occasion; that’s one of the prerequisites of their doom and fate as rank and file forever. They may even stop the wars, as they have done before and will again; ours merely to guard them from the knowledge that it was actually they who accomplished that act. Let the whole vast moil and seethe of man confederate in stopping wars if they wish, so long as we can prevent them learning that they have done so. A moment ago you said that we must enforce our rules, or die. It’s no abrogation of a rule that will destroy us. It’s less. The simple effacement from man’s memory of a single word will be enough. But we are safe. Do you know what that word is?’
The division commander looked at him for a moment. He said: ‘Yes?’
‘Fatherland,’ the group commander said. Now he raised the top of the covers, preparatory to drawing them back over his head and face. ‘Yes, let them believe they can stop it, so long as they dont suspect that they have.’ The covers were already moving; now only the group commander’s nose and eyes and the nightcap remained in sight. ‘Let them believe that tomorrow they will end it; then they wont begin to ponder if perhaps today they can. Tomorrow. And still tomorrow. And again tomorrow. That’s the hope you will vest them in. The three stars that Sergeant Gragnon won by his own strength, with help from man nor God neither, have damned you, General. Call yours martyrdom for the world; you will have saved it. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’
And now the division commander was no longer a general, still less the sergeant of twenty-five years ago whose inflexible pride it had been to accept odds from no man. ‘But to me,’ he said. ‘What will happen to me?’
And now even the nightcap had vanished and only the muffled voice came from beneath the covers. ‘I dont know,’ it said. ‘It will be glorious.’